1Mountain areas have been and still are very relevant to industrial production both regionally and globally. The process of industrialisation of the mountains varied greatly in time and space, from the early hydropower-based exploitation of the European Alps (Dalmasso 2007, Gebhardt 1990) in the late nineteenth century to the most recent developments in mountain regions of the Global South (Perlik 2019). Due to abundant natural resources, mountain areas usually host intensive and invasive industrial activities linked to raw materials extraction, use, and primary processing. However, a certain potential for lighter, greener, and digital-oriented industries is locally emerging, especially in the European context, fostered by specific regional development strategies and re-industrialization policies.
2In mountain contexts, the presence of diverse types and forms of industrial production has generated, and still does, productive landscapes with unique features and dynamics, hardly comparable to those traditionally incorporated or found in dense urban areas (Modica 2022). The spatial and functional interaction between industrial activities and semi-natural environments, also considering the complex and uneven morphology of mountain valleys, often translates into highly contrasting land use patterns with a very low inherent transformability. In some cases, the local exploitation of natural resources and the setting up of industrial processing facilities in previously rural or remote mountain areas fostered some forms of urbanisation (Perlik 2019), ranging from basic workers’ housing estates to entire new industrial centres, thus changing the face and the fate of entire valleys. In other cases, industry developed as an autonomous technological unit in highly sensitive natural settings, such as in the case of high-altitude hydropower energy or mining complexes (Dalmasso et al 2011, Weilacher & Modica 2020). In general, mountain productive landscapes are designed to exist according to a clear functionalist approach towards the hosting environment, in which the materialistic exploitation of it (the mountain is manipulated for the economic purpose of production) is accompanied by a tangible detachment from the same (the industry as a self-standing “machine” within nature).
3Regardless of their origin, characteristics, or typology, these productive landscapes are increasingly affected by the current socio-ecological transition, understood as a progressive adaptation of our economies and societies to a lasting condition of sustainability – that is, the ability to preserve human existence and well-being over time according to the environmental limits of natural ecologies, of which mountain areas certainly represent the most significant testbed on a global scale.
4Impacts can be measured, at first, in terms of management of problematic legacies, such as in the case of deindustrialising mountain communities facing socio-economic decline and widespread environmental degradation (Müller et al, 2006; Migliorati, 2021). On this point, questions can be raised if these local communities are less empowered and equipped than urban ones when it comes to dealing with post-industrial legacies or if they just need to follow a different approach to recovery and revitalization. The structural limitations of peripheral territories and communities can indeed represent a win-win situation for testing innovative approaches to foster alternative and sustainable development paths. Another way the socio-ecological transition might impact mountain productive landscapes relates to the necessary transformation of industry-related spatial patterns, such as mountain-urban systems originated from or attached to specific industrial activities – especially if still operating (Sega & Perlik, 2022). In this case, and considering their firm embedment in the mountain’s fragile environment, how would these settlements and the related urban morphologies respond to the socio-ecological transition? Furthermore, the impact of transition can also be considered in terms of new forms/formats of production that could take place in mountain areas, according to emerging and increasingly affirming paradigms of circularity (ECOLE, 2022; Grecchi et al., 2025) “just transition” (European Commision, 2018; McCauley & Heffron, 2018; Newell & Mulvaney, 2013) and green re-industrialization of mature economies (Capello & Cerisola, 2023). Will brand new productive landscapes appear in mountain regions? Will these develop in a symbiotic way with the specific mountain environment, differently from the past?
5The contributions gathered in this special issue explore the correlation between the change led by the socio-ecological transition and productive landscapes in mountain areas, focusing on their spatial, social, economic, and environmental transformations. The selected authors approach these dynamics through interdisciplinary perspectives, highlighting how such transformations unfold across different processes and forms. The articles provide interpretative readings through specific industrial sectors (mining, heavy industry, industrial district of recent formation), spatial configurations (including urbanisation processes such as company towns and mountain industrial settlements), as well as process-oriented trajectories (shrinkage, abandonment, or redevelopment, including the related legacies and conflicts).
6Reflecting on these questions, three axes were proposed for the authors to be explored: post-industrial realities; industry-related urbanization in mountain areas; and the future of mountain industrial landscapes. The first axis focuses on material and immaterial legacies of industrialisation in the mountains, perceived through the lens of landscapes as a mirror of social, economic, and environmental images and processes (Caroline Meynet). The second one deals with the production of space connected to mountain industries, that is, those physical transformations that occurred or are occurring in remote territories, which often involve forms of urbanisation or at least anthropisation (Cristiana Mattioli and Agim Kërçuku; Luca Zecchin). Finally, the third axis focuses on emerging forms and future concepts of mountain productive landscapes in relation to the circular economy and just transition paradigms (Silvia Lanteri and Roberto Dini; Federica Serra and Marco Del Fiore).
7The industrialisation of mountain areas has left a lasting imprint in the affected contexts, raising significant challenges and opportunities for territorial research. Limestone, coal, timber and other resources have been exploited for centuries, being the main development engine for otherwise unknown localities while leading to profound social, environmental, and economic consequences. Many of these old industrialised mountain communities or regions are now experiencing a more or less marked decline of their industrial base due to delocalisation, structural obsolescence, or rising ecological pressure (Modica 2019).
8Shrinkage, abandonment, or difficult redevelopment processes are common issues across several post-industrial landscapes in mountain areas, raising complex questions about the legacy and conflicts associated with de-industrialisation in these specific territorial realities (Storm, 2016; Migliorati, 2021). In the framework of the current socio-ecological transition, dealing with such a problematic legacy – which involves both material elements (contaminated brownfield sites, derelict spaces and architectures) and immaterial ones (forgotten cultural heritage, local identity and imaginary) – requires interdisciplinary approaches mixing spatial planning with social and environmental sciences, as well as innovative community-led participatory processes to regenerate a sense of place (Modica & Solero, 2022; 2025).
9Caroline Meynet’s article shows that these processes unfold over a long-time span and through successive phases. The study reconstructs more than fifty years of heavy industrial trajectories in three French Alpine valleys, using landscape as an analytical imprint to trace decline, reuse, and reindustrialisation. From the sequenced erasure of the Ugine phalanstère, or reconversion and adaptation at La Léchère and La Chambre, and contrasted afterlives from Venthon’s “waste disposal écoparc” to the contested Ugi’Ring at Château-Feuillet, Caroline Meynet’s contribution shows that industrial imprints in mountain contexts are tied to governance between public and private companies. Overall, Caroline Meynet shows that the future of Alpine productive landscapes is shaped less by the physical survival of industrial sites than by the ways in which local actors manage time, governance, and memory, deciding whether industrial pasts are maintained, transformed, or gradually removed within broader processes of urban and economic change.
10The second hypothesis explores the impact of industrialisation on the production of space and its long-term influence on urbanisation processes in mountain landscapes. The starting point is that, by occurring in often remote regions, these industrial-related territorial transformations generate specific forms of peripheral urbanisation (Perlik, Messerli & Bätzing, 2001). For instance, the establishment of towns was directly linked to the organisational level of the productive site, thus leading to planned communities or dispersed urbanisation flourishing nearby. Often settled as either planned or spontaneous temporary working camps, these settlements gradually matured into established urban centres that directly served the adjacent production sites, offering welfare services generally controlled by industrial capital at first and more democratic forms of organisation afterwards (De Almeida Santos, 2022). Urban expressions of industrialised areas in mountain regions are both a historical phenomenon and a contemporary global reality characterised by a continuous resource extraction and industrial production cycle. While the urbanisation of productive habitats has a longstanding history rooted in land exploitation and periods of industrial and technological advancement, nowadays, the influence of industrial processes in mountainous areas is resurfacing, fuelled by new demands for raw materials and growing concerns over ecological crises alongside social and economic instability.
11This second axis brings together the contributions of Cristiana Mattioli and Agim Kërçuku, and Luca Zecchin that critically examined the morpho-typologies of industrial-led urbanisation in mountain territories. The texts addressed a range of spatial configurations linked to productive processes, with a special focus on widespread urban-manufacturing systems in prealpine valleys. The contributions also analyse how strategic political and decision-making processes within leading companies have structured, and continue to structure, patterns of urban development and local governance. Through these perspectives, their contributions highlighted the enduring influence of industrial actors on the spatial organisation, regulatory frameworks, and institutional arrangements of mountain urbanisation.
12Cristiana Mattioli and Agim Kërçuku observed how the transition in the manufacturing sector is shaping urbanized landscapes and related life quality in the Lombardian “middle mountain” within the Central Italian Alps. The article discusses the results of a territorial research project which involved both data and on-site analyses, highlighting three co-existing processes and related morphologies: the decline of both heavy and light industries and the adaptive reuse of abandoned industrial spaces; the ecological degradation of valley river systems due to industrial activities and the attempts of urban-landscape regeneration; the post-productive economic system and local initiatives of territorial welfare to cope with changing social and cultural conditions. The article proposes a future-oriented and strategic reading of these specific territorial and spatial conditions in terms of desirability, which calls for production to be reinterpreted there by combining social leverages and the sustainable transformation of built-up systems.
13Luca Zecchin focuses on the densely urbanized valley floors of Italian Trentino mountains, where modern industrial developments have created from the 1960s onwards hybrid landscapes in which micro-productive patterns, intensive agricultural patches and low-density urbanization coexist in an “archipelago” condition. The author investigates the latter through on-site and topographical analyses, advancing the hypothesis that transition goes hand in hand, here, with the formal inscription – through design – of the disordered archipelago into a new, ecologically-balanced mountain-productive landscape. To that purpose, the author introduces planning and design guidelines adapting them to different territorial situations within the same context, advancing the image of an unprecedented, far from clichés Alpine urbanity which in recent years gained much relevance in the European debate on mountain development.
14In the last decade, the EU Regulations (such as the Just Transition and the European Critical Materials Act) have been moving towards ensuring that the transition towards a low-carbon economy and sustainable development is fair and equitable. Mountain regions are historically resource-rich areas, serving as a territorial subject to understand the local consequences of the global paradigms for socio-ecological transition. The need for new raw materials could rise by 60% in resource extraction by 2060 (UNEP, 2024), and this trend does not seem to align with the socio-ecological challenges.
15New productive processes with high ecological impact must be considered in areas with high environmental value. This functionalist approach to using nature seems conscious of its depletion and massive presence in the territory, but detached from the landscape itself. The soil and environmental exploitation and degradation resulting from industrial activities clash with the growing demand for critical raw materials, and their role in the ecological transition makes these territories crucial to new environmental challenges on a global scale.
16Building on this line of inquiry, the contribution by Federica Serra and Marco Del Fiore focuses on the need to articulate industrial development and environmental conservation in mountain contexts. Taking the Italian Valsesia Alpine valley as a case study, the authors examine how historical mining activities have affected forest management practices and produced long-lasting environmental consequences. Their analysis shows that extractive activities not only leave material traces but reconfigured semi-natural systems and the frameworks through which these territories have been governed over time. By shifting attention away from industrial friches toward broader territorial processes, Federica Serra and Marco Del Fiore propose to identify a specific form of post-industrial environmental heritage. This perspective challenges urban-based approaches to post-industrial regeneration and offers grounded analytical tools to read Alpine productive landscapes in relation to current sustainability agendas and policy debates.
17Silvia Lanteri and Roberto Dini present an interesting case of research-by-design dealing with the transition of the former industrial town of L’Argentière-la-Bessée, in the French Alps, and specifically on the large Pechiney brownfield site, which determined the fate of the entire upper Durance valley. The construction of the (a?) future is a key element in their article, which describes in detail how a participatory planning approach based on architectural co-design helped the local community to imagine the revitalization of the former industrial site into a regional production/education hub of excellence based on local resources and skills. Their research is indeed very effective in demonstrating the role of vacant or unused productive infrastructures as territorial capital, in the sense of material space to implement/enhance immaterial resources and capabilities.
18The articles gathered in this special issue underline that manufacturing in mountain regions must be read as a spatial process unfolding over time, and not like a sequence of isolated, unplugged industrial episodes. Across different case studies and geographies, industrial activities appear as structuring forces that have shaped Alpine valleys, mountain settlements, infrastructures, and environmental systems in lasting ways. The contributions show how production has influenced patterns of urbanisation, forms of inhabiting the mountains, and modes of territorial governance, often leaving behind spatial arrangements that remain difficult to read and to manage. From altered or dismantled company towns to hybrid urban and productive landscapes still in use, and to environmental systems irreversibly modified by extraction, the special issue sheds light on the persistence of industrial spatial logics well beyond the goal of production itself.
19These observations suggest several directions for future research. One possibility concerns the need for comparative studies that move across regions and scales, connecting local spatial configurations with broader economic, regulatory, and environmental frameworks. Another relates to the role of planning and design practices in contexts where inherited industrial forms constrain both ecological issues and social engagement. Contributions point out that design can operate as a mediating practice, capable of negotiating between previous industrial patterns and emerging production models, provided that governance and participation are taken seriously. Treating these mountain territories as sites of knowledge production and rooted habitability, rather than as marginal or exceptional cases, opens new possibilities for understanding how industry-shaped landscapes can be reoriented towards socially accountable and environmentally attentive futures.